New Name and New Location

Weekly Wiper readers are invited to follow Pearlville news and comments at our new location www.pearlvillepost.com.  The editor hopes that both of you will enjoy the new Pearlville Post.

Editorial: Visit the Creation Museum

Of the many interesting places we visited in September, the most interesting was the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky near Cincinnati.  My wife thinks shopping malls are equal to museums and she enjoyed this one.  As proof, she bought more stuff in the gift shop than she bought at Prime Outlets the day before.

To my knowledge there is no other museum devoted to presenting Genesis as factual history.  And why shouldn’t there be one?  Detractors say that Genesis is a myth because its assertions cannot be proved by scientific evidence.  The scientific history of our planet and the universe changes generationally based on the latest discoveries.  The scientific theories of the past are in the category of myths today, and that tends to level the playing field versus the creation story.

The Creation Museum is a wonderful presentation of Genesis.  The quality of the exhibits is on par with those in Chicago’s Museum of Natural History.  There are plenty of interactive opportunities for both children and adults.  The walk through Noah’s Ark is fascinating.  After the museum, we took a stroll through the several acres of beautiful gardens filled with plants that don’t look like they belong in this climate, but there they are.

Today a minority percentage of Americans accept Genesis as fact, so the Creation Museum invites controversy.  Probably the most controversial assertion is that dinosaurs and man coexisted.  This goes against everything archeology has discovered in the past 100 years.  But, on the fifth day God created all the fish and animals, and on the sixth day God created man, so there you are.  All creatures great and small coexisted with man.

In my small mind an obvious question popped up in the dinosaur exhibit: Why, in rock strata where dinosaur fossils are found, do we not also find human fossils as well as fossils of dogs, cats, and horses?  The question was not addressed in the exhibit, so the answer becomes one of faith.  I grew up with the Flintstones, so the Creation Museum’s answer is good enough for me.

Back From Vacation

Your humble correspondent took vacation for the month of September and is happy to be back.  Not that I think the Wiper was missed for a month, as it appears that life in Pearlville as gone on just fine without me or the paper.  I’m just glad to be back because I am not a Shopper.  My bride and I visited lots of interesting places within driving distance of Pearlville.  I like to drive but there is one downside to it: shopping malls are visible in every town.  She considers them to be cultural monuments on par with museums, particularly factory outlet malls which are revered on the same level as European cathedrals.

To me, that’s OK as long as one has a purpose.  I avoid them as much as possible, but when I have to go to the mall I am a Buyer.  I Go in, Get what I want, and Get out.  The 3 Gs are the rule for the Buyer.  But Shoppers are different.  They have no goal or if they do it’s a mystery.  Walking the mall with the wife has as much apparent purpose as walking the cat down the street.  She enters a store, meanders around for awhile, and then exits the store saying “they don’t have anything.”

The same thing repeats again and again until it’s time for lunch.  We have a sandwich in the food court.  Mine is pretty good and I finish it off in a few minutes.  She says hers is good too but she’s only half done because she’s been talking.  So I wait for her to finish her sandwich while enjoying the entire ambiance that a fast food court can provide.

Next step for me is to the parking lot until I am reminded that we have not Shopped the other half of the mall.  OK.  Again, the key word is “Shop” because she has nothing in mind to buy.  But it’s clear that she’s thinking of me because we passed several men’s stores where I was encouraged to visit.  “I don’t need anything,” I said.  Fine, we continue on as before, meandering this way and that while buying nothing.  Finally we leave and I am thankful.  I am most impressed that she had a wonderful Shopping experience even though “they didn’t have anything” she wanted to buy, not that day anyway.  But she has new destinations for future Shopping trips.  There was a purpose to this after all.